[e12e]

> look up when the next bus is coming

That's ridiculous argument against offline use - bus schedules are small enough data that we print them out and carry them in our pockets.

Sure, if the bus company socks, it might be nice to know about changes due to roadwork, real-time updates (ie look up the next bus via it's gps location and speed) - but doing off-line route planning would be a great feature...

[conroy]

It sounds like you're not a daily bus rider. The printed bus schedules are useless due to delays. I take transit into work everyday and you need to know when the next bus is coming or you risk waiting at a station for twenty minutes.

[problems]

Yeah, they're majorly helpful for transit commuters - you can avoid extended wait times, know when you can take a walk to the convenience store or even know when there's another or a bigger bus coming so you can decide whether it's worth getting on the packed bus or waiting for the next one. It really does change the transit game a lot.

[msla]

In Missoula, Montana, where I live, the Mountain Line app shows you where every individual bus on a given route is, and computes ETA to a selected bus stop.

I'm pretty sure that's common functionality.

(To be honest, the Mountain Line is very punctual, so I could likely do just fine with just a printed schedule.)

[e12e]

Where I currently live, the bus app does the same, but the difference between scheduled time at each individual stop is typically 1-3 minutes. So it's not like off-line functionality would be useless, even if on-line can add value. But it obviously only adds value when you're on-line - and if off-line the app doesn't work at all...

[peatmoss]

Displaying the live AVL data for all Missoula busses is not too bad. In Seattle where I currently live, not so much. Thus, most of our apps here tend to give arrival times of busses with nearby stops.

Fun aside: my dad drove for the Mountain Line many years ago. I rescued one of his 1970s yellow shirts with the embroidered logo patch a while back.

[pcthrowaway]

You must not live in a city with over 100 bus schedules.. in my city, the offline app which uses your location data to tell you what bus stops are nearby and what the arrival times of each bus are, is immensely helpful.

[PeterisP]

Can you elaborate why offline use is something that matters for bus schedules?

I mean, I get the usefulness of wilderness-related apps (e.g. ocean fishing) or various things that could be useful in an emergency like the aftermath of a hurricane, and for these offline functionality matters, but for buses, if you're within a few miles of a bus stop and the buses are running at all, then you're guaranteed to have high-speed cellular internet access and offline features don't matter.

I can imagine being in the middle of some national park where the closest bus is unimaginably far away but I still have mobile internet access, but I really can't imagine a situation where I'd care about buses but don't have internet. Or are USA data plans so small that it's worth thinking about the data usage (as opposed to just latency) of downloading a webpage with timetables?

[pharrington]

> If you're within a few miles of a bus stop and the buses are running at all, then you're guaranteed to have high-speed cellular internet access

This just isn't the case in the United States. There are large swaths of the country that straight up don't have high speed internet in any form.

[busthrowaway]

But those large swaths apparently have a bustling public transit system? Sorry, rural America lacks both decent cell service AND decent busses.

[pharrington]

Certainly, our rural public transit is a catastrophe in it's own right. That still supports the argument that there is a very real use case for offline bus schedule lookup.

edit: /apps/lookup